Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

If poverty is the mother of crime, lack of good sense is the father.

- La Bruyere, Jean De

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

It is because they took the easy way out that rivers, and people, go crooked.

Peterson, Jill

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Connolly, Cyril

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes

Will, George F.

My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way.

Capone, Al

A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.

Porter, O. Henry

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

Ellis, Havelock

10.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

11.

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

Wells, H.G.

12.

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

13.

If poverty is the mother of crime, lack of good sense is the father.

La Bruyere, Jean De

14.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Shaw, George Bernard

15.

Crime expands according to our willingness to put up with it.

Farber, Barry J.

16.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

17.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

18.

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.

Christie, Agatha

19.

Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it's intimate and psychological -- resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

20.

After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.

Huston, John

21.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is also true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.

Kennedy, John F.

22.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

Genet, Jean

23.

He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, let him not know't, and he's notrobbed at all

Shakespeare, William

24.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

25.

The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

Canetti, Elias

26.

One usually dies because one is alone, or because one has got into something over one's head. One often dies because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support. In Sicily the Mafia kills the servants of the State that the State has not been able to protect.

Falcone, Giovanni

27.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

28.

There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.

Durkheim, Emile

29.

He reminds me of the man who murdered both his parents, and then when the sentence was about to be pronounced, pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was orphan.

Lincoln, Abraham

30.

The truth of the matter is that muggers are very interesting people.

Winner, Michael

31.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

32.

How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.

George, Henry

33.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

34.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

35.

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

Hazlitt, William

36.

Want of money and the distress of a thief can never be alleged as the cause of his thieving, for many honest people endure greater hardships with fortitude. We must therefore seek the cause elsewhere than in want of money, for that is the miser's passion, not the thief s.

Blake, William

37.

There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

38.

All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost -- the most legitimate -- passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.

Sade, Marquis De

39.

It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and consequently to our own. Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is theft, whose effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at equality? Plainly, the answer is no.

Sade, Marquis De

40.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

41.

The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.

Foucault, Michel

42.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

Arendt, Hannah

43.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Camus, Albert

44.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Mencken, H. L.

47.

Save a thief from the gallows and he will cut your throat.